Cake or Death?

It's continued to snow every day, with temperatures at or below freezing. That has not stopped Io and me from running out to do errands, though. Well, actually, today it did -- we got halfway to the bus stop and turned around to head back to bed and jammies and Civilization V. But other days we totally braved the cold. Martisor, the big March 1 celebration, is tomorrow. I went out to get Io a Martisor charm. Her totem animal is an owl, so I was looking for one of those. In California People of Windsurf U.S., owls are seen as gentle, wise creatures. You think of your classic owls from fiction, your Bubo, your Hedwig, your Mister Owl the tootise pop professor, and they're all pretty well-respected. Disney even made an entire CGI movie about heroic owls recently. Americans like their owls.

Unfortunately owls are not so well-respected in Romania. According to Io, out here owls are viewed as dirty, loud, and annoying, the way Americans view vultures or Frenchmen. Because of that, I came up completely empty in my search for owl-themed Martisor charms, despite checking like four places.

Which is irritating, because apparently spiders, toads, and rats all somehow make the cut, despite the fact nobody in their right mind would want to cuddle up to any of those things. Owls don't bother us during the day and keep us pest-free at night. In my book that is better than being poisoned, covered with warts, or having your entire city decimated by the Black Death. But what do I know.

Tania and Gagi came back from their trip to Constanta, where I guess all the ceremonies went well. They also brought back a Romanian, uh...thing, whose name I forget so I will just call it Death Cake. It's this traditional dessert that Romanians make only for funerals and other rites for the dead. Io called it a "cake," but it's actually more of a mash. According to Io, traditional Romanian Death Cake is boiled grains, sugar, and walnuts.

In a macabre twist, Io loves Death Cake and the joy in her face when she found out Tania was bringing some back was positively ghoulish. You definitely get the feeling that late at night when only Io and the vampires and werewolves are awake, she lies in bed secretly hoping that someone will die so all of us can have Death Cake.

That is, all of us but one person.

Now, I think we all know by this point that I'm not one to throw stones at another culture, but I am just saying that if it were me, I would not make a tradition in which my untimely death has definite up-sides. But that's Romania for you. Unfortunately, the Death Cake that Tania brought back from Constanta was the traditional ingredients plus coconut and raisins, which Ioana furiously dismissed as Death Cake made "by fucking Turks," whatever that means. You can take the girl out of Castle Dracula, but you can't take the Castle Dracula out of the girl.

Constantly weighing your continued living against tasty cake

The end of the month is also the time in this blog when we Take Stock. So far, so good. The pregnancy's going well and everyone's healthy. Finances were kept to $500 spent in Romania again this month, although only because expenses were offset by ESL classes. Still, we're way under budget. And I haven't starved or gone insane or anything like that, so I count myself ahead of the curve. Next month, needless to say, things should get pretty interesting.

Book reviews from February:

Dracula: The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker. This book answers a question as old as human thought: when someone buys you a book, how much of it do you have to read before you're allowed to declare it garbage and stop? It turns out the answer is seventeen chapters.

Jingo, by Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett is like the Danielle Steele or Stephen King of light fantasy novels. He churns out books by the truckload (I think usually 1 or 2 a year). Wikipedia lists 39 books in his "Discworld" series, which is the main stuff he writes. These books are all set in the same fantasy world and are all about the same large cast of characters (although each book focuses on a subset of the large cast). They're comedic, usually satires of the real world, and they are all light, pleasant, not challenging, and good for at least a dozen chuckles each. Pratchett is deeply libertarian, a cause close to my dark and flinty heart, and I've always looked at his writing as a limitless well of enjoyable, throwaway stories: the perfect thing for a plane ride or a vacation, a day at the beach or a rainy day on the couch. He's hugely popular, so you can go to any bookstore that has a sci-fi/fantasy section and be guaranteed a large selection of Pratchett books. He's the perfect go-to author, with an inexhaustible supply of new story ideas and unlimited energy and enthusiasm for writing them. One of the most warm and familiar reassuring presences in my reading life.

A couple of years ago Pratchett announced that he's suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He has a rare variant called "posterior cortical atrophy," which has progressed to the point where he can think and come up with stories, but can neither read out loud nor write. He's dictating new stories to an assistant as long as his condition permits. The existing stock of Pratchett books has suddenly become much more precious.

The books are written in chronological order, but I tend to grab them at random off of store bookshelves or Amazon. Jingo is I think one of the early-to-mid books, and it's good and worth reading, but not as good as most of his other books. It's funny and interesting, but the best of his books have something important to say underneath the comedy, like all good satire does. This one is basically about the meaninglessness of war, but somehow it doesn't quite hit home like a lot of his other books do. Still, a good way to spend a couple of weeks.